Adobe Systems has announced a prerelease alpha of its Adobe AIR software for the Linux operating system. Version 1.0 of AIR for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X was launched last year.

The move provides additional tools for Linux developers to build rich Internet applications, and RIAs created for Mac and Windows users can now be extended to Linux users without additional platform-specific code.

Joining the Linux Foundation

Adobe also announced that it is joining the Linux Foundation to boost the growth of Linux-based RIA technologies, and that it is making an update to the alpha version of Flex Builder 3 for Linux available. Recently, Adobe released as open source the software development kit for the Flex framework and for BlazeDS, which supports data-intensive RIAs. The company also said it continues to contribute to the open-source Tamarin virtual machine, the core of its Flash player.

David Wadhwani, general manager of Adobe's platform business unit, said these releases “provide a first-class application runtime and RIA-creation tool to the Linux community.”

Flex is a free, open-source framework for building RIAs that can run on the desktop with AIR or in a browser with Adobe's Flash Player. On the desktop, RIAs can have access to offline data that has been constantly updated via the computer's network connection. In the browser, they can operate with the responsiveness more common to desktop applications.

Adobe Versus Microsoft

Al Hilwa, program director at industry research firm IDC, said these moves help Adobe secure additional credibility in the open-source community. “Open-source developers look at all large vendors with a suspicious eye,” he noted, “but Adobe's done much more with the open-source community than, say, Microsoft — relative to its size.”

Hilwa pointed out that Adobe “is trying hard to cozy up to that community,” in large part because of its ongoing battle against Microsoft's Silverlight. Silverlight is a competing platform for RIAs, and some observers have called it a “Flash killer.”

While Adobe's Flex and AIR have been in the spotlight a great deal in recent months, Hilwa said Silverlight ls going to “be quite compelling over time.” He pointed out that it is based on the Windows Presentation Foundation, part of Microsoft's Vista operating system, and thus has a large base on which to build. Hilwa also noted that it took Flash the better part of a decade to reach its current ubiquitous state, with Adobe claiming that the player now reaches more than 98 percent of Net-enabled PCs.

In this context, Hilwa noted, it's in Adobe's interest to appeal to the open-source community so it can “get as many 'votes' as possible” in its competition with Microsoft. Although it's not clear, he added, that Linux is going to be a major operating system for desktops, the support for Linux shows that Adobe is serious about being open and multiplatform.